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Why do you need a holiday home website? - European Holiday Home Rental |
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The Internet can be a cost-effective way of advertising your property to let – ignore it at your peril. Why ignore the Internet when it can be the most cost-effective form of advertising? Once a website is set up, it need cost you no more than £5 a month, yet it is a permanent and highly accessible showcase for your gite, cottage, or B&B. Don’t be put off by thinking that you need to have any technical knowledge. You don’t even need a computer, although the ability to receive and send emails is a great advantage. What
makes a good website? Firstly, it should be easy to find by people carrying out searches for their holiday accommodation. Secondly, it should download quickly. It has been found that if a web page takes longer than about eight seconds to appear on a computer screen, the person is likely to go elsewhere. Next, it must be visually attractive, and show what you have on offer in an uncluttered way, with a nice balance between pictures and text. It should be simple to navigate, with clickable buttons to take you to subsidiary pages containing the information people are likely to want. A
typical website may be constructed as follows: · Home page with title, logo, description and maybe two or three small pictures, contact details, and buttons, leading to: · Property – fuller details of the property or properties being let, with bigger pictures and descriptions of the accommodation, facilities etc. · Locality – Details of places of interest and beauty in the area, with pictures. · Map of the area showing the position of your property or properties, and a description of how to get there. This can then be printed out by the traveller to enable them to find the property. · Contact page containing tariff and terms, and an enquiry/booking form which can be completed online and submitted at the touch of a button. This will go straight to you as e-mail. The
website should be constructed in such a way that it will achieve as high a
position in the search engines as possible.
This is done by strategic placing of words that people are likely
to use to search on the first page of the site, and also creating
‘key-words’ that do not show on the screen, but are in the background
programming of the site and are picked up by search engines when
constructing their indexes. Your
website designer should also register you site with all the major free
search engines. So
what is the cost? This
will vary, and you can pay anything from £79 to £2,000, but for a five
page site a figure of between £300 and £500 would be about right.
A really cheap site is unlikely to work, because it will look cheap
and will not easily be found by searchers. Can
you do it yourself? Yes,
you can, but there are several reasons why you shouldn’t.
Do you service and repair your own car?
Perhaps not. Creating
a website takes many skills. If
the site doesn’t look professional you may put people off.
Attention should be given to colours, design, themes, text,
graphics, buttons, etc. Pictures
should be ‘optimised’ so that they download quickly.
Websites will be reviewed on equipment of all types, from small
14-inch monitors with low resolution to hi-res 19 inch and above.
Pictures stay at a fixed size, but text adjusts itself to fit the
monitor, so what looks good on one resolution can be awful at another, so
this has be allowed for by the designer. Above
all, attention to key-words is vital if anyone is ever going to find the
website when searching the billions of pages on the Internet. How
do you choose your designer? So,
if you decide to have a website, how do you find a good but inexpensive
website designer? There
are several ways. You can do
a search on the Internet for website designers in your area.
Another good way is to look at the websites of your competitors,
and select a few that you admire. Make sure you look at several websites that he/she has designed, and that you like their style. Try to avoid ‘flashy’ sites with lots of movement. This irritates people. Ask for a price for a five page site, and what it includes. Are there any extras? Does it include search engine registration? Speak to them on the telephone, and see if you establish a good rapport, and like what they say. Once
you have settled on a suitable website designer, you can either arrange to
meet, or more likely send the photos and text that you would like to be
included. Remember to tell
them your choice of colours for the background text, and send a copy of
your logo if you have one. If
not, they should be pleased to create one for you if required. One
additional consideration is the selection of your own domain name.
This is the name which will be printed on all your publicity
material and advertising. The
name typically takes the form www.yourname.co.uk
or it could end with .com instead of .co.uk. The
cost of having your own domain name can be as little as £10, then perhaps
a £15 set-up charge so that the website is ‘hosted’ somewhere.
After that there will be an ongoing hosting charge of perhaps £5
month. That’s all it need
cost. It is preferable for
your website designer to register the name for you, otherwise you may be
faced with having to transfer the name to the server that they use, and
this could take time, and cost extra. Once
your website has been created and installed, you should have a certain
pride in the end result, and it will become a useful resource for your
letting business. It will
also back up your advertising and leaflets. So if you are hesitating about having a website, perhaps now is the time to ‘take the plunge’. It shouldn’t take much effort from you, nor cost very much, but the rewards in terms of high booking rates for your property will make you wonder why you didn’t set one up before. Another option is to register your property with a company such as jmlvillas.com. For as little as £11.75, they will provide you with a web page, which describes your property with great accuracy and includes up to six photographs. However, more importantly, they have a large marketing budget and attract plenty of well, targeted traffic looking for holiday homes like yours. This targeted traffic is something that you do not get without making a considerable investment in time and money to promote your site. For more information take a look at the jmlvillas.com website. Article from French Property News
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